Welcome to NBlog, the NoticeBored blog

I may meander but I'm 'exploring', not lost

Aug 13, 2012

Social media naivete

Users of social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook don't always appreciate how much information they are giving away as they naively post updates. For example, this site figures out where you live from the GPS info you send to Twitter from your Android system, looking up the latitude and longitude on Google Street View, while this site simply filters Facebook updates for potentially incriminating or embarrassing information.

Using social media Application Programming Interfaces to query their public message databases is much the same in principle as using Google to find sensitive stuff published inadvertently on the Web. Once information is published, it is there for people to use.